A former employee for Intuit, the Mountain View, California-based financial software giant and TurboTax owner, claims in a new lawsuit that the company illegally fired him for social media posts linking drag queens to sexual abuse of children.
Brian Gilton, described in the lawsuit as “a passionate 37-year-old white male who regularly exercises his rights to participate in political activity, including political speech,” worked as a senior content designer for Intuit for three years, until his termination in August, according to the lawsuit.
Intuit sent Gilton packing over two Instagram posts about two weeks apart in June 2022, he claimed in the lawsuit filed last week in San Francisco County Superior Court.
“We’ve got 2-year-old babies at drag shows, and contemporary leftists are cheering it on to prove how ‘progressive’ they are,” the first of the posts said, according to the lawsuit.
The second post said, “you’re not a bigot if you don’t want your three-year-old getting dry humped by a cross dresser,” according to the lawsuit.
Drag performance typically involves men dressed and made up as women.
Gilton was told by phone in July 2022 that Intuit was investigating the two posts, and was informed the following month he was being fired for them, he alleged in the lawsuit filed Thursday.
“The real reason for his termination was because of his participation in political activity, including political speech,” Gilton claimed in his lawsuit.
Intuit confirmed Gilton was a “former employee” but said it had a policy against commenting on any individual’s employment. “At Intuit, we strive for all our employees to feel a sense of belonging and value diverse perspectives,” Intuit said in an emailed statement. “We ask everyone to share those different perspectives in a manner that is respectful and inclusive.”
Drag queen story hours, often in libraries, have become a right-wing rallying issue and an increasingly heated flashpoint in America’s culture wars, with conservative lawmakers and pundits claiming the events sexualize children and feature “grooming” of kids by pedophiles. In June, members of the far-right and sometimes-violent Proud Boys group barged into a Drag Queen Story Hour event at the San Lorenzo, California, Library, hurling slurs at the event’s organizer and briefly forcing the performer to flee for safety, an Alameda County sheriff’s spokesman said. Republican legislators in several states are seeking to ban and criminalize certain drag performances in front of children. Advocacy group GLAAD reported that 141 incidents of anti-LGBTQ protests and threats targeting specific drag events took place last year.
Jenny Coleman, director of the Massachusetts-based anti-child-sexual-abuse non-profit Stop It Now, said sexual abuse of children is not part of drag performance. “There is no correlation, there’s no data, there’s no research that (drag performance) at all poses a risk to children,” Coleman said. “Drag performance is not a stepping stone to a child being sexually abused.”
California, like nearly all U.S. states, operates under at-will employment law, which gives employers wide latitude to fire employees, including for statements made outside the workplace. The First Amendment applies to government limits on free speech.
Gilton claims Intuit broke California labor law that bars “forbidding or preventing employees from engaging or participating in politics” and “controlling or directing, or tending to control or direct the political activities or affiliations of employees.” He also alleges the company broke another California law saying employers cannot “coerce or influence or attempt to coerce or influence” workers by threatening to terminate them over “any particular course or line of political action or political activity.”
Gilton’s purported Instagram posts, as reproduced in the lawsuit, put his criticisms of drag shows into a political context. He suggested that drag performances for children represent a long-in-development left-wing reaction to what he described as conservatives’ “unfair” linking in the ’80s of homosexuality to sexual perversion. “These deeply, deeply lost leftists who are cheering on drag queen hour for 3-year-olds are lost in a planet-sized collective reaction to 40-year-old cultural conservatism,” one post said, according to the lawsuit.
The other post asserted, according to the lawsuit, that “if you don’t fall in line with whatever new craze reactionary psychotic mouth-foaming public tirade propagated by the far-leftist globalist corporate media and their automatrons in leftist culture, you have your career destroyed, you’re canceled, you’re erased from society, and you’re deemed a bigot, a racist, a ‘hate’ monger, a pariah, all because you didn’t do as you were told by leftist mob.”
Gilton is seeking unspecified damages.
